NY noir

Just read an excellent NY noir novel, Disturbed Earth by Reggie Nadelson (who is described in this Bookreporter profile as "an international woman of mystery"--I think this is an unfortunate coinage; actually, there's a funny but slightly grotesque Austin Powers reference in the novel, but still...).

Prose style isn't Nadelson's particular strength--this novel called to mind Jim Fusilli's Hard, Hard City and the Mo Prager novels by Reed Farrel Coleman, but where both Fusilli and Coleman are really angelic sentence-writers, Nadelson's sentences are more serviceable than stylish (and the punctuation definitely could have used another go-through--yes, yes, I know I am ridiculously pedantic with this, I have the soul of a copy-editor). But Nadelson more than makes up for it with her journalistic-sociological sensibility--the characters are all appealing and complex and the stuff about NY truly excellent, there's some great Russian-Brighton Beach stuff and other very nicely observed scenes in different social milieux. Definitely recommended--it's an interesting book a s well as being a highly readable one, you get the feeling that Nadelson would be an excellent person to hang out with.

(Incongruously Nadelson's novel is blurbed by Paul Theroux and Salman Rushdie. Disconcerting! Clearly she moves in rather elevated circles...)

Michael Chabon

has a great quotation from S. J. Perelman on his website: "Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws." Now that's a novel I want to read... or perhaps it can be a scene in my sequel to Dynamite No. 1.

Casting about last night for something good to read

I came upon a random used paperback I bought some time ago, A Cold Day In Paradise by Steve Hamilton. Within a few pages I realized I was reading a low-key but spectacularly good private-investigator novel, with excellent Upper Peninsula setting, appealing main character, great writing--I don't know why I didn't pick it up sooner, except that it's a weird little paperback promotional copy with a special cover of the "Dear Reader ... we've taken the unusual step to create advance reading copies of a book that's already been published in hardcover" kind. It is amazing how rarely such messages make a book sound more appealing. However I found it absolutely delightful, and best of all there are at least five more in the series, I am going to go and get them from the library as soon as possible.

Oh and

here's a better selection of interviews with Antony. Scroll down and there's a great one with Lou Reed, plus lots of other good stuff.

An outrageously good concert last night

I went to see Antony and the Johnsons last night with a lovely group of people that included this blogger and another one I'm tempted to link to but won't in case it exposes the connection between her daytime identity and her top-secret exciting blogger one. The concert was truly spectacular, just magically good--it was at the Town Hall, every seat was full and everyone in the audience was completely mesmerized. (The last thing I saw there, randomly, was David Remnick interviewing Sy Hersh at the New Yorker festival. Clearly this is a high-quality venue.) I loved every single minute of it, Antony is an extraordinary musician and with the most amazing voice and a really lovely rapport with his band members as well (that bass player is adorable), and I have been listening to the albums like crazy and every single song is great. He has the gift of ratcheting up the emotional intensity so that everyone's on the edge of their seat, and meanwhile his voice is as silky and powerful as ever. Here's a review of a show that sounds much like the one last night--I thought highlights were "Dust and Water," where he asks the audience to hum and sings a quite haunting little song a capella except for, oh, it must be something like 4,000 people very quietly humming; and the Lou Reed encore, "Candy Says," one of my favorite Lou Reed songs of all time. Seriously, if you're not listening to Antony, you must get hold of his albums and start to do so RIGHT NOW, you will not regret it: here's the first and the second on Amazon, or of course you can get it from iTunes but I can't be bothered to link.

Addendum: I recently almost put down a novel after the first few chapters (see fuller account here), and it was a reference to Antony and the Johnsons that made me keep reading, I felt it signaled something more offbeat and appealing about the author's taste than I had yet seen in the first chapters.

An excellent NY noir/eve of WWII thriller

Hour of the Cat, by Peter Quinn. This is a model of its kind: great characterization and settings, well-constructed and complex but also very clear plot, ominous world-historical backdrop. I often have a gripe with novels of this type--in general, I would prefer a stripped-down, leaner noir novel without so much of the real-major-players-in-history counterpoint--but in this case it's so well done (Admiral Canaris is particularly well-drawn) that I had no objections. Very, very good.

Just read

a really disturbing (in a good way) young-adult vampire novel by M. T. Anderson, Thirsty. I was particularly taken aback by the ending--it definitely wasn't what I was expecting.

I'll also note that Thirsty has one of the funniest Amazon customer reviews I've seen for a long time. It's got the heading "thirsty for lies"--I'm 95% sure it's a joke, but there's a slim chance it's for real:

This book is good but it has many lies. First,people just dont TURN into vampires, they have to be blooded. Second, they CAN tell who other vampires are in a crowd, but not by their shadows, they have an aura (a scent a vampire gives off).

This book was very missleading. If you want a book that is true, I would strongly recommend a different book. If you are looking for a fairy tale, this would be your book.

So there!

Kepler's Eye

Just finished an uncannily good fantasy novel, A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park. (Recommended by Gwenda and others I can't seem to find links to.) It's quite excellent, rather Pullmanesque (including some interesting animal stuff) but completely original and of its own kind as well. And here's a good interview with Park about the book. I want the sequel NOW!

Because I have a brain like a sieve

and also read too many novels I all too often find myself opening up a book whose author's name is completely strange to me and rapidly discovering that I'm already familiar with the series--in the worst-case scenario with the actual book itself. However in this case it was the happy version--I started reading It's Raining Men by Naomi Rand and remembered the main character Emma Price immediately--the first two books in the series are great, and this one's absolutely excellent. A must-read for anyone who likes urban private-investigator-type crime stuff, or good New York noir--really appealing characters, and also excellent writing of a low-key and understated but immensely skillful variety. (It is not a coincidence that the author bio reveals that Rand has an MFA in fiction. She has an excellent prose style, but also a really good sense of what makes a page-turning crime novel. Would be a good thing if more MFA graduates turned to writing this kind of book, the crime novel has always been a hospitable place for good stylists.)

I have only one complaint about the book. I am not going to spell out what's wrong with the following exchange--either you don't know anything about Scotch and you will find my explanation completely pedantic or else you will see the ridiculousness for yourself and your jaw will drop at the fact that multiple editors missed it. Here's the conversation in question (Emma's on the job at a post-Oscar celebration party where her film-editing-ex-husband's evil boss has made an appearance--he's behaving badly to the waitress at the River Cafe):

"Sweetheart, do me a favor, would you? Ask what you've got by way of a double malt?"
Off she went again.
....
The waitress was back. "We have Glenlivet, Dewar's, and La . . ." She looked bemused. "Sorry, the last one's hard to pronounce."
"Laphroaig," he said. "Sweetheart, you forgot to find out how long they've been aged."
"Sorry."
"How about you just choose one of them," Emma said.
He gave her a curious look.
"Really, it's no trouble," the waitress was saying.
"The lady says I have to choose, then I will." Shutting his eyes, he added, "Eeny, meeny, miney, moe." His eyes sprang open. "Laphroaig," he told her. "You come back and see if you can pronounce it for me."

Anyway, otherwise it's excellent.

Reread the lovely if slight A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle, which is like a sort of answer to French existentialism. Just now I've finished Land of Echoes, the second novel in the Cree Black series by Daniel Hecht--I really, really liked it--it's substantial but also rather enthralling. I think he had a big upturn in quality between the second and third novels he published; the first two are far too much the ponderous novel-of-ideas thriller for my taste, then he hit the groove with the Cree Black series (and I am delighted to see that the premise implies it will go on for fifty books, one for each state!), and the prequelhe then published to one of his earlier books was really also infinitely better than the first two.

A great essay by Alan Hollinghurst

about Sybille Bedford in the NYRB (not online, unfortunately). It's a review of Quicksands: A Memoir, but it covers her whole career in a really admirable and thoughtful way--I do love Hollinghurst, he's on my very short list of most highly regarded writers.

I love Bedford too and can't help but disagree with his judgment about the pair of her novels that I have read most often. I must read them again and see what I think these days, it has been some years since I last read them. Hollinghurst quotes Waugh as saying about A Legacy, "I think it was clumsy to have any of the narrative in the first person. The daughter relates things she cannot possibly ever have known as though she were an eye witness"; Hollinghurst then perceptively adds that Waugh "touches on something which will be an abiding small problem in Bedford's work, that she seems often unable to work out how to tell a story, that is, where to tell it from."

Here's his main commentary on "her next two, much lesser novels, A Favourite of the Gods (1963) and its sequel, A Compass Error (1968)":

A Favourite of the Gods is indeed a dismayingly bad book, in which Bedford seems to reveal herself as being all the things we had specially prized her as not being, snobbish, smug, and humorless. . . . The title itself perhaps gives warning of what Bedford herself calls the "highbrow Mills & Boon" color of this novel.
....
A Compass Error is a tauter and more focused, if still fairly solemn affair, evidently steeped in the light and emotion of Bedford's own youth in the south of France. It contains a lesbian relationship between Cosntanza's teenage daughter Flavia (now a third-person character) and an older woman clearly based on Renee Kisling, the wife of the Polish painter Moise Kisling, who figures prominently in Jigsaw. One is glad that Bedford should have written openly, and with a proper lack of fuss, about this central but otherwise only glancingly acknowledged aspect of her life; but it is still hard to forgive the book's hopeless organization. The fifty-two-page chapter ("A Night") in which Flavia, in bed with Therese, tells her the story of her mother's life in the tones of an omniscient adult is one of the least plausible feats of narration since Conrad's Marlow wound up his tale of a journey to the Congo. Still, all these forcings and awkwardnesses seem at some level expressions of Bedford's admirable and insatiable struggle to make artistic sense of her life.

I think I have a much higher tolerance than Hollinghurst for this kind of waywardness in point-of-view. (It is almost comical, the irritation with which he notes that Flavia has gone from being narrator to third-person character in the switch between books!) I think the point-of-view question is perhaps the most difficult thing about writing fiction--it's related to voice, but it's harder to find the right perspective than to write good sentences--on the other hand, fiction would be a lot more boring if we didn't sometimes get heedless rule-breaking by novelists who should have known better. The very tight, controlled Jamesian third-person voice of Hollinghurst's fiction is an impressive and extraordinary thing but its control in the end makes it perhaps less appealing to me than the intensely personal fiction of someone like Bedford.

Interesting profile of Peter Singer

by Stuart Jeffries at The Guardian. (Link via the Literary Saloon at the Complete Review.)

Miscellaneous light reading/rereading

I can't seem to settle into anything substantial, mostly because I'm gearing up for a major work effort. Read two books by Peter S. Beagle, one of those writers that really sticks with you: Tamsin, which I have read before and love (it's a ghost story, but it's also a great angry-female-narrator-girl-from-NY story, add it to Suzy McKee Charnas--who by the way has an interesting blog and an excellent website--and Meg Rosoff and other more remote analogs like Harriet the Spy and Madeleine L'Engle's Vicky Austin books); and Folk of the Air, which I liked very much--it's exactly the kind of book I like--though not as much as Matt Ruff's Fool on the Hill, which is I think my favorite university-town urban fantasy. I am grateful, however, not to be living in 1970s Berkeley surrounded by people dressed in medieval garb--it's sort of my worst nightmare.

I was thwarted in my desire to read more novels by Daniel Hecht--I requested a whole bunch from the library and they arrived only for me to find that (a) I'd already read Skull Session, without remembering the name of book or author, and hadn't liked it nearly as much as the prequel Puppets which I read last week; and (b) The Babel Effect is the kind of high-concept, lots-of-stuff-about-religion-and-ethics-and-evolutionary-theory-and-the-brain kind of thriller that in theory I love but in practice I have virtually given up reading since I started getting more exciting book recommendations from the litblogs. So I put both aside.

I did read two first novels this week as well, which I should really refrain from criticizing since I thought they were both very promising if flawed: Double Cross Blind by Joel N. Ross (OK, I can't resist the marginal comments, but really this book was quite decent though marred by a few literary glitches--Raskolnikov didn't kill his landlady, the title of Joyce's novel is not "The Odyssey"--and it's also hard not to read this stuff as overshadowed by Robert Harris and Alan Furst); and Clare Sambrook's Hide and Seek (I absolutely LOVED the first few chapters, but found myself more and more regretful that she hadn't written this as a more conventional thriller rather than a first-person-child-narrator literary novel--it is quite good, and really excellent in spots, but doesn't match up to Ben Rice's extraordinary novella Pobby and Dingan or a host of other great similar things, and I thought it would have worked better as something more like this). But both Ross and Sambrook are likely to write really good books in future, I'd say. Keep an eye out, and check out these ones too.

One of the great pleasures

of the kind of academic work I do is that you occasionally come across some stunningly good book that is so weird and memorable and little-known that you feel it is your personal property. I get this pretty often. (I think my favorite one last year was August Weismann's essays on heredity, which are so lucid and smart and funny and self-aware that you feel like you're right there in the same room with him, though they were published in the 1880s. Weismann was immensely well-known and respected in his day, but hardly anyone reads him now--more's the pity.) It's like a kind of real-world ghost, the way that some books bring their authors to life so vividly and forge such a connection with the person reading: of course that why a lot of canonical novels are still read (Austen and Dickens), but it's even more fun when it's some relatively obscure nonfiction book whose author's jumping off the page at you. All this is a long way of saying that I cannot resist pasting in another quotation from Timothy Nourse, who published a volume called Campania Foelix in 1700. It's an amazing book, I think everyone should read it who's interested in this period at all (Garland reprinted it in their garden book series, and it's also available through EEBO or ECCO or one of those on-line databases). I could give you pages and pages, but I won't. Here's the kind of thing, though, that just makes me fall out of my seat laughing in horror and sympathy--Nourse has such a distinctive way of thinking about things, you feel you could pick him out of a police line-up on the basis of the irritable and put-upon expression on his face:

I have been told Abroad by some German Gentlemen, that it was a usual thing amongst them, in the Warmth of their Debauches, (which in those Countries are excessive) to drink their Healths out of the Barrel of a cock’d and loaded Pistol, with Finger on the Triquer, whilst they discharge the Wine into their Throats; so that upon the least Miscarriage of an unsteady Hand, the Bullet would not fail to do its Duty. This Point of Bravery being over, they all give a Volly on fire together, and then charge afresh, and so on. If this kind of Gallantry were in vogue amongst us, I believe we should have fewer Drunkards than now there are, and by going out of this World by a Draught of Flame, they would be better prepar’d to drink of it for ever in the next.

Social Darwinism avant la lettre!

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles"

Saw a spectacularly good play tonight, Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come! at the Irish Rep. First half rather better than the second, but then that is a very common problem even with great plays. I've read some of Friel's plays, but have never seen one onstage, and was really blown away by it. Incredibly good acting by James Kennedy (Private Gareth) and Helena Carroll (Aunt Lizzy), but really all the actors are excellent. The play makes good use of snatches of song and radio pastiche and other stuff including a particular favorite line of mine from Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. Highly recommended.

I think it is a character flaw

that I find Ian McEwan (or at least his recent fiction and public persona, he himself is probably a perfectly nice guy) so annoying, everyone else I know who cares about such things seems to be a great enthusiast, but I've just read a typically maddening interview with McEwan by Robert Birnbaum (actually, it's a great read, very revealing, as are all Birnbaum's interviews, but there were at least three places where I was ready to be sick!):

IMcE: I often think, 'What was this golden age to which you hark back to? The '50s?' Literary culture was always a minority culture. Every small town you go to you will find some person who is just obsessed by books. They are everywhere, those people, and they pop up in the most unexpected places. Peoples whose lives are in books. They often have a very unhealthy look.

RB: [laughs]

IMcE: I meet these guys and they are usually guys. They have read far more than I have or ever will, these particular kinds of poets and dreamers who really have a mad hunger for reading.

RB: That would be a hopeful sign.

IMcE: I think so. But generally, those guys apart, the novel is sustained by women. And like most of the differences between men and women we find what we get a big chunk in the middle of the bell curve, of women who read constantly and steadily. And among men a far lower number reading but at the far end of the spectrum just a few utterly crazed enthusiasts.

Seriously, there are so many reasons this is an absurd thing to say... I thought the other most awful passage was this:

I think this generation of kids is far nicer than we were, to their parents, on the whole. My kids were happy to sit around the table and talk and they’d bring their friends. One of the great bridges, which we never had with our parents, is the music. They don’t have a radically—fortunately, my kids don’t like drum and bass—if that was their music than there would be nothing to talk about. Their music is all built on the same rock and roll base of ‘50s and ‘60s, that our music was built on. So we have a bridge.

It's the aside that kills me--"fortunately, my kids don't like drum and bass"...